


Charlie Davis and the Big Sleep

by miss_nettles_wife



Series: Charlie Davis and the Big Sleep [2]
Category: The Doctor Blake Mysteries
Genre: Fallout AU, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 06:48:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19329310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/miss_nettles_wife/pseuds/miss_nettles_wife
Summary: After 200 years on ice, Charlie Davis is set loose on the Australian Wasteland.





	Charlie Davis and the Big Sleep

**Author's Note:**

> this started as a drabble, and became a double drabble....and now we're here. It's been almost a month since i posted a fic whoops.

Time is a difficult thing to grapple with now a days. 

That wasn’t to say time itself had changed. Sixty seconds still made a minute. Sixty minutes made an hour. Twenty four hours made a day. 

No, it wasn’t time that had changed, it was Charlie. No matter how many journal entries Rose had left for him on that big, American terminal back at the Vault, how was it possible for anyone to grapple with the idea that something that felt like it happened barely a week ago, was to everyone else over two centuries ago? 

He was a man out of time, just like Rose was a woman out of time before him, and Blake a man out of time before her. 

But he wasn’t the only one. According to the notes that ninety year old Rose had left for him, he could maybe find people he used to know if he made it to Bad Luck City. Seeing that he’d already been to Tyneman (an affluent settlement built out of the Tyneman’s personal bunker) and had no such luck, he figured that he really had nothing to lose. So, he set a waypoint on his Pipboy for Bad Luck City and took off. 

These American wrist computers were really something. Shame someone thought that they could steal it from him by cutting his wrist off. Having it on the right was cumbersome compared to having it on the dominant left. On the inside, it was worn down for a smaller wrist. It used to be Rose and he’d taken it off her bones back in the Vault before digging her a suitable grave. It seemed like the least he could do. 

For not the first time, he lamented the unfairness of it all. To have been so far away from her when she needed him. Yes, he’d made it to the Vault, but at what cost? He’d lost his family, his friends, his life, everyone he’d ever known and for what? He wondered, as he passed the deep ravines and abandoned dirt roads, was the world like this for Rose, one hundred and fifty years ago? Was there someone waiting for her in the Vault? What sort of life was there for her out here? 

And what sort of life was waiting for him. 

If his understanding of the whole thing was correct, and frankly he wasn’t sure it was then technically he wasn’t alone. 

Technically speaking he should have Danny. 

If the pods were set to open at ten year intervals than ten years ago Danny should have been set free. When Charlie checked the pod across from him; where he last memory was Danny waving at him as the Vault Tech workers pulled the door of the ‘decontamination pod’ over them, it was empty. So, theoretically, Danny should be alive. They’d be the same age, actually. 

But there was no Danny. He hadn’t even taken the Pipboy from Rose, so he must have been even more lost than Charlie himself if that was at all possible. 

When he arrived, he noted a huge set of gates stopping him from entering. It was a grim day out, a light speckle of rain wet the pavement in front of him and forced him to continually wipe water and his saturated hair from his face. 

From a distance, Bad Luck City was a bright looking settlement composed of falling buildings and centered around what was, in another life, the Colonists Club. He wondered if the people who founded Tyneman (Tynemans, if he had to guess) were upset that they couldn’t have that particular building in their settlement but he supposed it almost didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. The Colonists Club was now City Hall and it belonged to Bad Luck City. 

“You! Vault Dweller! What’s your business?” 

His head snapped up at the man who was manning the gates. He stood out, pressed into his blue and gold vault suit but what else was he meant to wear? He had taken a few pieces of armor off some of his victims but he drew the line at clothes. Maybe there was someone inside selling clothes? Unconsciously, he adjusted the heavy leather piece he’d been wearing over his chest. 

“Ahh, hoping to trade a bit.” He lied. The man whispered with another, and the gate opened. He couldn’t help wonder what had inspired the change in security. According to the Rose, Bad Luck City let anyone in without question. It was sort of the place’s mission statement. A place for anyone who needed one. 

“Don’t make trouble.” He was warned. Charlie took that into consideration. He didn’t really know what he was expecting to find here. Anyone that Rose might have known was probably long dead, or moved on. Maybe some work? He didn’t really have the skills to be a caravan guard or anything like that but perhaps they were taking on new recruits? 

At any rate, he needed some clothes that didn’t automatically identify him as the dreaded ‘other’ and he knew that like in any settlement there’d be someone here selling clothes. Of course, he suspected he might be able to afford them with the admittedly megear amount of bottle caps he’d managed to scrape up since he’d gotten away from those Raiders last week.

And maybe some decent food, while he was at it. He’d heard there was a place doing rice bowls around here and frankly, he was tired of eating dandy boy apples and bloat fly meat. Didn’t matter what the caravaners me met said; there is no way to make fly meat taste good. 

Before he’d managed to get too far into the settlement, he was almost taken out by someone who wrapped their arms around him. His initial fear was that he’d been tackled. He just about tackled back before they started talking in a low, gravelly sort of voice. A voice that was trying to escape damaged vocal chords, he thought. 

“Charlie!” 

Embarrassingly, Charlie had no idea who this person was. He’d hoped to find someone he knew but stupidly, he’d expected to find someone that looked how he remembered them.  He tried to run through some of the people Rose hadn’t left answers for in her terminal. Danny? Too feminine. Same with Matthew. 

The woman held him tight and close. She was a ghoul and like all ghouls, she smelled like a body that Alice had him help her collect once. One that had been lying undisturbed for a few weeks. When did he become so judgemental, he wondered, as he raised his arms to hug her back despite himself. It’d been too long, even before the war. 

He knew it wasn’t Rose, because he’d seen what remained of her back in the forgotten Mycroft Avenue vault. He knew it wasn’t Alice because he didn’t think that she would hug him no matter how much time had elapsed between then and now. He didn’t think his mother would be in Ballarat and he was quite sure that Mattie would still be in London. 

Under the smell of decomposition, he caught a whiff of something familiar, chemically floral. Something that he’d smelled every day for years. Something that he could just about place. Something that strongly smelled like home. 

She pulled back and he finally got a good look at her face. 

Like most ghouls, her colouring might have been pleasantly peach once but was now green and necrosis black in some parts. Her left upper lip had rotted away entirely exposing two yellowed teeth. Her nose was entirely gone, leaving only the heart shaped hole in the bone where her airways were. On her head, she had only a few wispy strands of chocolate brown hair. 

“I probably look a little different to the last time I saw you.” She said, and under the gravel, her voice sounded so familiar, so attached to a comforting,warm memory deep in his grey matter. “Rose told me you made it to the Vault, but it’s been so long I almost didn’t believe her.” She said, “I prayed for someone from the old days, I prayed for you.” 

The pieces finally managed to click into place. 

“Jean.” He breathed. When she smiled at him, her two front teeth were chipped and broken.

“Jean.” She confirmed, before taking hold of his hand in two of hers. He could feel her tendons flexing under the thin skin. He’d never been this close to a Ghoul before. In fact, since he got out of the Vault, he hadn’t been this close to anyone. She was still warm, which perhaps made the whole thing just that more confrontational. She was still warm. Like she hadn’t been dead for very long, his brain offered up. 

He shook the thought away and looked back to her. After 200 years on ice, it was good to see a friendly face. 

 


End file.
